From Broadchurch to Southcliffe, from Top of the Lake to What remains, the
television schedules are just full of gloom. Ben Lawrence attempts to
uncover the cause.

Something very strange is happening in British television drama. In 2013, we have had intimate knowledge of a handsome, humourless serial killer’s existence, witnessed the spectacular free fall of a close-knit community after the death of an 11-year-old boy, seen the spectacular free fall of a close-knit community after a lone gunman went on the rampage and been thrown into the cheerless lives of heroin addicts, illegal immigrants and murderers in a volatile patch of south London. Misery TV abounds.

It started in January with Channel 4’s misleadingly titled Utopia in which a group of people in possession of a cult graphic novel found themselves chased by a violent organisation called The Network. Horrific acts of violence played out against a grey urban landscape. Potentially funny scenes were short circuited by a mood of despair.

And things got bleaker. ITV’sBroadchurch might have seemed, ostensibly, like a conventional whodunit but soon took the viewer into a painful world of exposed emotions. The scenes that linger in the memory are not plot-driven, but of intense visceral outbursts – the dead boy’s mother discovering her husband’s infidelity, a detective leading the investigation realising that her husband is the boy’s killer.

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We’ve also had The Fall (BBC Two) that revealed the identity of the serial killer from the outset, and then through a self-consciously hip filter made his horribly controlled world look like a Calvin Klein ad. In the past month, Run and Southcliffe (both Channel 4) have offered unsettling portraits of contemporary Britain, lacking in warmth, where people merely exist. Conversations are rare, words stumble out of mouths like shards from a Samuel Beckett manuscript.

Even the gilded world of costume drama isn’t immune to the misery. Forget the eternal Edwardian summer, BBC One’s The Village reinvented 1914 as a misery memoir (with all the half-truthful embellishments that the genre demands). Channel 4’s The Mill, about the foundation of the workers’ rights movement in 1830s Lancashire has a palate so grey and a mood so sombre that it is like watching Queen Victoria’s funeral procession on a loop.

So what’s happened? Certainly ambition plays a big part. Budgets for TV drama are now higher than for most feature films in the UK and this is transparent in the result. Everything has a cinematic sheen as directors strive to become auteurs and stamp their own aesthetic on a production. All of the dramas previously mentioned would have looked impressive on the big screen; the vast grey soupy skies of Southcliffe’s Kentish wilderness, the frenzied camerawork that defined Run’s urban claustrophobia, the deceptively jaunty long shot through the town of Broadchurch which paid homage to Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. It is no coincidence that several of these dramas have been made by film directors. Gillies Mackinnon directed part of The Village, the very English Southcliffe was created by the dispassionate eye of American Sean Durkin.

This need for filmic rigour has even seeped into the genre thriller. This week sees the start ofBBC One’s What Remains, a sort of high-concept whodunit in which the residents of a Victorian conversion flat each become a suspect when a woman’s body is discovered in the attic after two years. Once this would have been routinely directed, but through the lens of Coky Giedroyc (The Hour), it has become a haunting work about isolation and human desire, every nook of the peeling, rambling house exposed to show it has some sort of significance.

The much-discussed influence of Nordic noir must also be responsible for the dramatic sea change. Ever since The Killing debuted in Britain in 2011, we have shown a taste for non-signposted murder mysteries that unfurl, in a languid fashion, over a dozen episodes. Red herrings are hungrily scooped up and then dismissed, an ambiguous mood hangs in the air, nuance is key. Watching shows such as The Killing and Borgen is rather like reading a novel as you have to absorb every moment.

This investment is crucial as it rewards the viewer, makes them feel intelligent, allows them to inhabit that world. British TV rarely adopts Scandinavia’s long-form approach (Broadchurch, at eight episodes, was an exception) but it will be interesting to see if our current broadcasters’ business models will allow that to change. Perhaps the most obvious influence of Nordic noir is visual style. The utilitarian architecture, steeped mists and dusty committee rooms are very much present in our TV landscape. It has also influenced what we import – Channel 4’s French zombie drama The Returned and Jane Campions’s Top of the Lake both fitted the British appetite for gloom, and gloom constructed through a certain artifice.

A few years ago things were very different. If today’s TV viewer is trapped in an Ingmar Bergman film circa 1971, the Noughties viewer was trapped in a Carry On film from 1973. This was the age of the comedy drama, with ITV as the main proponent of the genre. There was William and Mary, starring Martin Clunes and Julie Graham, about an undertaker and his midwife partner, At Home with the Braithwaites about a dysfunctional lottery-winning family with Amanda Redman. Life Begins starred Caroline Quentin as a newly single forty year-old intent on grabbing early middle age with both hands. These were knockabout shows, unchallenging and warm-hearted, which tackled serious issues (cancer, divorce, alcoholism) but wrapped them up in neat bundles and allowed every obstacle faced to be overcome with neat resolutions. The characters tended to fall into two categories: lovable eccentrics and, that clichéd observation, “ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances”.

A pleasing location was often a key ingredient. Monarch of the Glen benefited from the lush greenness of the Scottish Highlands, Doc Martin (also starring Martin Clunes and, a remarkable survivor in the genre since it is just about to enter its sixth series) often looks like a promotional film for the Cornwall Tourist Board, Stephen Fry’s Kingdom turned the potential bleakness of Norfolk’s market towns into something far cosier than the truth.

Perhaps the roots of Noughties feelgood TV can be traced back to two key successes in the Nineties – the Richard Curtis romcom and ITV’s relationships drama Cold Feet. Both, manipulatively but brilliantly, set up an ensemble of contrasting characters allowing every viewer an identification point. They navigated life’s thornier path with a lightness of touch and they feigned emotional truth (witness the funeral in Four Weddings and a Funeral) while in reality only swimming in the shallow end of human experience. The characters were also usually well off, giving the average viewer a voyeuristic thrill as they cast their gaze on a Notting Hill town house or a grand slice of Didsbury Victoriana.

However, misery TV is nothing new. In the Seventies, Britain was on the brink of collapse and drama reflected this, fuelling our worries about economic uncertainty and our Cold War paranoia. The BBC’s Survivors (1975-1977) was a post-apocalyptic thriller where most of the world population had been obliterated by an accidentally released plague. Conspiracy dramas were a rage, too, with long-forgotten works such as The Donati Conspiracy, State of Emergency and 1990 mining Orwellian themes of dictatorship and freedom of information. Even children in that decade could not escape the despair. The Changes, based on Peter Dickinson’s trilogy, is a case in point. Any child tuning in to the first episode on 6 January 1975 would have witnessed a dystopian nation smashing up all technological devices and reverting to a pre-Industrial age. Even in the gloom of 2013, it is unlikely that anything as brazenly downbeat as The Changes would be commissioned for a younger audience.

Despite a change in the UK’s fortunes, television drama was not necessarily cheerful in the next decade either. Certainly, flagships such as Brideshead Revisited (1981) reflected a burgeoning optimism but some of the most lauded dramas of the Eighties – Threads, Edge of Darkness, Boys From the Blackstuff – were challenging, aggressively questioning and dark. This was also a time when that now-neglected beast, the cerebral comedy drama, thrived. Series such as A Very British Coup and A Very Peculiar Practice told downbeat stories in a rather upbeat way. The latter, written by Andrew Davies (who would be responsible for turning costume drama into sportive heritage TV in the Nineties) was shrouded in an air of existential gloom. Set at the medical centre of the fictional Lowlands University, the series concluded with the entire campus being sold to a private US company who turned it into a defence research base. Never has a series ended to quite such a peal of mirthless laughter.

It is hard to imagine A Very Peculiar Practice finding a place in the current schedules. In 2013, there is no appetite for light and shade. Southcliffe, The Mill, Broadchurch and Run all play out along a straight line of unremitting grimness with few characters offered a glimpse of redemption. But that seems to be what the public wants. Broadchurch ended with an audience of 9 million, The Mill – hardly the most commercial of ventures – had debut ratings of 2.4, Channel 4’s highest for a drama launch in three years. These are the shows that people are engaging with on social media, too.

It is as if we have grown wise to the contrivances of humour in drama, as if there is a mistrust in anything that doesn’t strive for a grainy authenticity. This is a troubling thought. With their heightened sense of reality, the misery dramas of today are not authentic. But perhaps what they do offer is a more direct acknowledgement of unhappiness that has been absent from our screens for too long. It is as if we no longer care about laughter; we want the difficulties of life in 2013 to be directly addressed. In that case, it may even be a phase – as the green shoots of recovery burst forth, so drama commissioners will feel the urge to lighten the mood.